Sascha SeganAmazon Kindle Fire HD (7", Wi-Fi)The 7-inch Amazon Kindle Fire HD is a great way to consume your Amazon content on a small screen, but it's not the fastest or most flexible $200 tablet any more.

Gorgeous screen. Very easy to use. Amazon Prime members get lots of video and book content. Multi-user parental controls.

Cons

Rigidly locked to the Amazon ecosystem. Sluggish on occasion. Other tablets have more apps.

Bottom Line

The 7-inch Amazon Kindle Fire HD is a great way to consume your Amazon content on a small screen, but it's not the fastest or most flexible $200 tablet any more.

The Amazon Kindle Fire HD ($199/16GB; $249/32GB) isn't a tablet. It's more like a shop window onto the world's biggest content department store. The new 7-inch model from the super-retailer offers up a well-designed interface that provides an easy way to consume Amazon's huge library of content and services and to buy, buy, buy. That makes the Kindle Fire HD (KFHD) highly entertaining, and potentially the best purchase for tablet shoppers who value ease of use over all else. But in an increasingly competitive 7-inch tablet market, it stops just short of earning our Editors' Choice award. That honor remains with the Google Nexus 7.

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Physical Design and Battery LifeThe Kindle Fire HD feels more solid, well-built, and premium than the original Kindle Fire, which some people thought was made from leftover BlackBerry PlayBook parts. At 7.6 by 5.4 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and 13.9 ounces, it's slightly bigger, but slimmer and lighter than last year's model. The corners are more rounded, and the back is softly tapered with a grippy feel. It's constructed mostly of a matte plastic material, with a shiny black strip along the back housing two powerful, dual-driver, room-filling stereo speakers. The Power button is now recessed into the right side panel, as opposed to the original Fire's unfortunate bottom-mounted button, and there's a hardware volume rocker next to it.

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Fire up the display, and—WOW! The 7-inch IPS LCD is only 1,280-by-800—a fairly standard resolution for a small-screen tablet—but it's non-reflective, with great color balance, and a terrific viewing angle. It's better than the Nexus 7's same-spec display. You'll be able to watch this for hours.

Above the screen, there's a 1-megapixel video camera that can only be used by certain apps, such as Skype and Evernote. You get micro HDMI and micro USB ports on the bottom panel, but no memory card slots, and the battery isn't removable. Fortunately, the KFHD has pretty long battery life, with a solid 7 hours of video playback with the screen pumped up to maximum brightness. The Nexus 7, though, scored more than 10.5 hours on the same test.

Interface, Apps, Content, and AdsThe Kindle Fire HD runs Amazon's custom operating system over a base layer of Android 4.0. Call it "Amdroid." While Amdroid is compatible with most third-party Android apps, the user interface is totally unrecognizable from stock Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). The focus is on letting you easily play with the stuff you download from Amazon.

The first thing you'll see when you turn on a Kindle Fire HD is an ad. Amazon feeds these "offers" to your tablet instead of showing a standard lock screen. During my review period, they rotated between one ad for a TV show, three for movies, one for a book, and two offers for $5 Amazon coupons. A two-line text ad also floats at the bottom of every home screen while you're using the tablet. If you hate the ads, you can pay Amazon $15, and you'll never see them again.

Like the earlier Kindle Fire, the KFHD's home screen starts with a horizontal list of clear, text options: Shop, Games, Apps, Books, Music, Videos, Newsstand, Audiobooks, Web, Photos, Docs, and Offers (the aforementioned ads). Below that there's a large, rotating carousel of the most recent icons you've used. There's no easy or obvious way to flip through multiple apps you're running at the same time, although the music player hangs out in the notification bar so you can pause it as needed.

If you're in portrait mode, the sell gets even harder: Many of the recently used icons on the home screen start to display a list of suggested purchases below them, while links to webpages show other trending pages.

Click into any category and you get a virtual bookshelf of your content, divided into Cloud and Device sections. When you have Wi-Fi signal, you can download stuff to move it from the Cloud (where you have unlimited storage space for your Amazon-purchased content) to the Fire itself, or delete it back into the Cloud to free up your available 12.6GB of on-device space. (There's no memory card slot, but you can double your storage with the 32GB Fire HD, which will cost you an exta $50.) When you're outside the reach of Wi-Fi, only the Device shelves are available. All the sections also have a link through to Amazon's store so you can buy more content when you're connected, of course.

The Web comes courtesy of Amazon's Silk browser, which has largely failed to live up to its promises of being super-fast and seamless through cloud acceleration. While it's a perfectly fine browser, Chrome on a Tegra 3-based Android device is faster with smoother scrolling. Amazon says Silk will speed up over the next several months as its servers optimize various Web pages.

About the Author

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 13 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, hosts our One Cool Thing daily Web show, and writes opinions on tech and society.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer. Other than ... See Full Bio

Amazon Kindle Fire HD (7", Wi-F...

Amazon Kindle Fire HD (7", Wi-Fi)

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